The Cermony
Notes during the work with the film: Beginning with the picture on the title page of Rudbeck’s Atlantica, in which Rudbeck tears a piece off the soft earth’s crust, revealing Sweden as the sunken Atlantis, and in the same audaciously unscientific way freed from reality’s hold, in layer by layer of time and film, like abandoned or yet to be built cities, identities, histories and places appear and are concealed: Tutankhamen’s crypt and unbroken seal, Bredäng and the grave of Caspar Hauser, the strange entrance to the old Stasi headquarters in Berlin, other places and other prisons, bound together by subterranean passages. This little film actually wants to be understood as an act of resistance, like a tentative breaking out of an order where the maximum speed and movement’s hyper synchronised time cannot be expressed other than in a stagnated and timeless flickering present. Does it not feel sometimes as if we were cut off from both the past and the future? Encased by machinic processes that want to destroy us? As if the future is no longer a promise of emancipation, just a more or less vague threat of an approaching disaster, and one that we ourselves have caused? The uncertain hope that might counter the loss of experience and community is admittedly voiced on a stage that is always other and with gestures that remain abstract – but still, another rhythm is possible: an alien, unknown time, incompatible, turning endlessly into itself, but that reveals itself and disappears.